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Thursday, January 26, 2012

“The call to prayer happens five times a day and for the first week it drives you crazy, and then it just gets into your spirit and it’s the most beautiful, beautiful thing.

“There are 4,000 mosques in the city. Some are just stunning and it really makes me think about becoming a Muslim.”

He needs to think about this some more. There's nothing stopping him from praying regularly as a Catholic, which I gather he doesn't really practice. Catholicism is a far more intellectual religion than Islam, so Islam tends to suit those that have trouble with concepts such as The Trinity (three persons in one God) or the Incarnation (the Second Person of the Trinity becoming man). If he stays Catholic, no one is going to make him pray like the almost political nature of Islamic group prayer where if you are not there joining in, people will notice.

Hilaire Belloc said of the Islamic religion that "it was a perversion of Christian doctrine". That on the whole, Mohammad, a pagan who lived on the fringe of the Catholic world, absorbed Catholicism and simplified his own version of it. However, by denying the Incarnation, he went much further than the Arians of his time (Christians that denied Jesus was divine), and by doing so wiped out the whole sacramental system of Christianity, making Islam very different. See an old post of mine, The great and enduring heresy of Mohommad.

Belloc also predicted back in his time (the first half of the previous century) that Islam would return. In a time of massive Christian lukewarmness, it is any wonder that those such as Neeson are attracted to the enforced religiosity of Islam?

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Too true. A lot of Islam's backstory has been cribbed from Biblical stories. Figures such as Jesus, Abraham, Mary and Moses figure in them. Actually, Robert Spencer is putting a new book out in April question whether Mohammed actually existed..

Are jihadists dying for a fiction? Everything you thought you knew about Islam is about to change.

In Did Muhammad Exist? best-selling author Robert Spencer meticulously examines historical records, archaeological findings, and pioneering new scholarship to reconstruct what can be known about Muhammad, the Qur’an, and the early days of Islam. He uncovers evidence that calls into question fundamental assumptions made even by non-Muslims. Did Muhammad Exist? reveals:

* The earliest biographical material about Muhammad dates from 150 years after the traditional date of his death.* Neither the Arab conquerors of the seventh century nor the people they conquered made any mention of Muhammad, the Qur’an, or Islam for fully six decades.* Recent scholarship indicating that the Qur’an was constructed from existing materials—including a pre-Islamic Christian text.* Numerous archaeological indications that Islam as a religion was fashioned for political reasons.

Far from an anti-Islamic polemic, Did Muhammad Exist? is a sober and unflinching look at the origins of one of the world’s major religions. While Judaism and Christianity have been subjected to searching historical criticism for more than two centuries, Islam has, astonishingly, never received the same treatment on any significant scale. In bringing to light the latest scholarship on Muhammad and Islam, Robert Spencer raises questions of global consequence.